It is now possible to be free from suffering

lindy

2017-09-30 14:08:24

Re: LBP and actualism:

Henry posted:

“RICHARD: It is helpful to draw a distinction betwixt physical pain and emotional/ mental pain. Physical pain is essential, else one could be sitting on a hot-plate and not know that one’s bum was on fire until one saw the smoke rising. Emotional/ mental pain (which is what I always indicate by using ‘malice’ and ‘sorrow’) is totally unnecessary … an impediment preventing salubrity. The same affective/ sensate distinction also applies to pleasure (in the ‘pleasure/pain’ context).” from

@craig “why would you think there would only be comfort? Pain serves a purpose. I can’t see how we could live free from pain. Just as a basic example the pain associated with the need to urinate. Without that eventually you would wet yourself… in comfort?”

I find these examples not relevant for the question at hand. And here is why. Richards’ quote is an example of distinguishing between physical sensations, thoughts and feelings. No problem with that. Understood. The part that uses the hot plate as an example is relevant for the normal physiological reflexes. That is not relevant for chronic low back pain unless that part of the system got messed with.

In addition, Craig’s example of urination too does not hold relevance. Craig, if you experience the “sensation” of the need to urinate as pain, it would indicate there is a medical issue. If you are describing the “pressure”/awareness of the need to urinate that is something quite different. That is using the body’s sensation, a normal physiological experience, to take action. I am asking about “pain”

Richard’s response of “I am not omnipotent” too is limited. I do not experience him as omnipotent, I do believe that he is “sensuosity”. If that is the case at what point did he stop feeling sensuosity and instead feel pain? In his journal he writes about the movement of his body, arms swinging, the feeling of his own movement. When did that stop? Why? If we are living the body in a “perfect”, actual world, I think it deserves clarification.

dona

2017-09-30 15:18:16

please explain what you think sensuosity is and in what way that would exclude him feeling pain?

lindy

2017-09-30 15:33:58

This is the best I can do for now

The issue is not whether he experiences pain. As stated pain is a normal physiological response to a noxious stimulus. The question is chronic pain. Below are some snippets I found on the AFT website. None of that describes the experience of pain. If one is living the experience below, I have a hard time understanding how one can experience chronic pain simultaneously. That’s what I am hoping to have answered.

Peter: Sensuousness is the wondrous awareness of the marvel of being here now at this moment in time and this place in space.

Sensuousness enables the experiencing of things without distorting feelings, and seeing the world of people, things and events as-it-is in apperception.

With an actual freedom from the human condition, one is living in the infinitude of this fairy-tale-like actual world with its sensuous quality of magical perfection and purity where everything and everyone has a lustre, a brilliance, a vividness, an intensity and a marvellous, wondrous, scintillating vitality that makes everything alive and sparkling … even the very earth beneath one’s feet. The rocks, the concrete buildings, a piece of paper … literally everything is as if it were alive (a rock is not, of course, alive as humans are, or as animals are, or as trees are, but everything is alive as in actual – ‘not merely passive’). This ‘aliveness’ is the very actuality of all existence … the ‘actualness’ of everything and everyone.

We do not live in an inert universe … but one cannot experience this whilst clinging to the delusion of immortality.

This too is Peter’s writing:

All sensate experience be it sight, taste, hearing, smell or touch is picked up by the sense organs which are but the ‘stalks’ of the brain. These signals are usually filtered by the ‘self’, the psychological and psychic entity within each of us, resulting in ‘normal’, edited sensate experience. When this filter is temporarily absent as in the peak experience or some drug induced states, the sensate experience can be direct and unfiltered. Then the sensate-only experience is extra-ordinary. One has a heightened sensory perception free of any sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’. To live this as a permanent state is Actual Freedom – freedom from the Human Condition.

dona

2017-09-30 15:52:43

I guess you cannot see there is no contradiction… All of what you quoted is actual, he lives that way (sensuosity). And he has a condition that causes pain. As I mentioned, we have been together for over a week, every day for 4+ hours… And I have not once seen any evidence that the pain affects his “state of being”.

They are “mutually inclusive” (for him) … Having a pain and experiencing the world as wonderous…